Welcome to Modern Art & Ideas! This course is designed for anyone interested in learning more about modern and contemporary art. Over the next five weeks, you will look at art through a variety of themes: Places & Spaces, Art & Identity, Transforming Everyday Objects, and Art & Society. Each week kicks off with a video that connects works of art from The Museum of Modern Art’s collection to the theme. You will hear audio interviews with artists, designers, and curators and learn more about selected works in the additional readings and resources.
Throughout this course you will discover how artists:
-- represent place and take inspiration from their environment,
-- create works of art to express, explore, and question identity,
-- use everyday objects to challenge assumptions about what constitutes a work of art and how it should be made,
-- and respond to the social, cultural, and political issues of their time through works of art.
Through the discussion forum prompts and peer review assignment, you will also have the opportunity to connect with other learners and explore how these themes resonate with your own life and experience.

Taught By

Lisa Mazzola

Assistant Director, School and Teacher Programs

Transcript

My name is Kara Walker and this work is 40 Acres of Mules. The title of the work is a play on, 40 Acres and a Mule, the thwarted promise purportedly given to emancipated slaves. This drawing was started shortly after I had taken a trip to my parents' home in Lithonia, Georgia. I went down to Stone Mountain. It's a multi-use amusement park with a Confederate theme and checked out the monument to the Confederacy and the three figures who are carved into the granite, Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, and Stonewall Jackson. And I went down there shortly after the racist murders that happened in Charleston in South Carolina. 40 Acres of Mules began as a parody on Stone Mountain. When I started out, I really thought this was going to be a direct commentary on those three figures who are barely perceptible beneath the melee in the foreground. But, instead turned into this free for all of stereotypical figures, some recognizable, some products of my own freewheeling imagination. One of Stone Mountain's complicated legacies is this the legacy of the Ku Klux Klan using Stone Mountain as the grounds for its rebirth in the early part of the 20th century. When I moved to Stone Mountain as a teenager, the Klan was still holding rallies. It's still a site of a lot of contentiousness and the neighborhood around Stone Mountain has shifted in the last 30 years to primarily African-American. So it's very odd. The central figure is very small, but I think probably very significant with the large phallus and being held up by another variation on Jefferson Davis with a hand near a gash in his side and he's tied up in a Christ-like mode. This is like the central themes around the protection and protectionism of the American South of the white male American mind that somehow this colored male figure represented a substantial threat, socially, psychologically, sexually, and had to be or was in fact destroyed. The black body itself could never satisfactorily die enough for the white ruling class to breathe easy. That body is representative of all bodies that are oppressed or subjected to this kind of psychosexual torture.

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